The range of the guitar on piano and stave

The range of the guitar in context

Following on from the post on The Stave and the Clef and a follow up thread The range of the guitar in TAB in the group Music Theory, Nal made a chart!

I thought this was so good I decided to blog this information, so thanks Nal for sorting this, let’s share this information!

What you find in this picture is the connection between the piano, the guitar and the stave.

The “middle C” as it’s called on piano sits between the treble clef and the bass clef on a ledger line for piano players.

This C is on string 6, fret 8.

Same note on different strings

On the guitar, unlike on a piano, you can find the same note on several strings.

Let’s explore this, using the diagram above:

Middle C can be found in two places, on string 6, fret 8 and on string 5, fret 3.

The octave of this C, which sits on the stave, can be found in 4 places:

  1. String 5, fret 15
  2. String 4, fret 10
  3. String 3, fret 5
  4. String 2, fret 1

The next octave of this C, which you find above the stave on two ledger lines, can be found in two places on the guitar:

  1. String 2, fret 13
  2. String 1, fret 8

Find more notes in more places!

A great exercises in order to find all the notes on the fretboard is to take a note like I just did and find it on as many places on the neck as possible.

Maybe you could pick a new note every day, like A for example, how many places on the neck can you find an A?

First start with the lowest, how many strings? Then move on to the next octave, find all A’s here.

As a variation to this exercise you could ignore what the octave is and just aim to find the note all over the neck.

Maybe this time you start at the lowest fret possible and then move up the neck, play all notes.

If this was an A you would move up like this:

  1. Open A string
  2. Fret 2, string 3
  3. Fret 5, String 1 and 6
  4. Fret 7, string 4
  5. Fret 10, string 2
  6. Fret 12, string 5
  7. Fret 14, string 3
  8. Fret 17, string 1 and 6

Music Theory in The Spy Tunes Method!

My latest eBook Music Theory is now available in The Spy Tunes Method.

-Dan (your guitar guru)

Key Signatures

Learn how to Change Key!

In order to play in a different key, higher or lower than C, we need to make alterations to the stave.

For example, let’s say that when playing in C major it was a little bit too low to sing, we can then transpose this a tone up to D and make it easier to sing.

But this means we need to make adjustments on the stave in order to maintain the same relationship between all notes.

In the image below you see how I simply start on the note D but the intervals aren’t actually the same anymore.

C (T) D (T) E (S) F (T) G (T) A (T) B (S)

D (T) E (S) F (T) G (T) A (T) B (S) C (T)

Between E and F we only have a semitone, between C and D we should only have a semitone, so let’s change that:

C (T) D (T) E (S) F (T) G (T) A (T) B (S)

D (T) E (T) F# (S) G (T) A (T) B (T) C# (S)

In order to get the same intervals between the notes when we changed key from C to D we had to sharpen two notes, the F to F# and C to C#.

This way we have changed key signature.

Find all Key Signatures

To fully explore all keys we start on the 5th of the previous key and then make our alterations:

C (T) D (T) E (S) F (T) G (T) A (T) B (S)

G (T) A (T) B (S) C (T) D (T) E (T) F# (S)

D (T) E (T) F# (S) G (T) A (T) B (T) C# (S)

A (T) B (T) C# (S) D (T) E (T) F# (T) G# (S)

E (T) F# (T) G# (S) A (T) B (T) C# (T) D# (S)

B (T) C# (T) D# (S) E (T) F# (T) G# (T) A# (S)

As you can see, every new key is a 5th up and has one more # added.

When we get to the key of B almost all notes have been sharpened, but we only covered 6 keys.

In order to continue with this system and cover all 12 keys we go up a 4th from C and flatten the intervals instead, like this:

C (T) D (T) E (S) F (T) G (T) A (T) B (S)

F (T) G (T) A (S) Bb (T) C (T) D (T) E (S)

Bb (T) C (T) D (S) Eb (T) F (T) G (T) A (S)

Eb (T) F (T) G (S) Ab (T) Bb (T) C (T) D (S)

Ab (T) Bb (T) C (S) Db (T) Eb (T) F (T) G (S)

Db (T) Eb (T) F (S) Gb (T) Ab (T) Bb (T) C (S)

Gb (T) Ab (T) Bb (S) Cb (T) Db (T) Eb (T) F (S)

This time we add a “b” every time we create a new key.

Pictured above are two examples of how this looks in the Song Writers Swivel (key of A and Eb).

Next we shall find out what this means on the fretboard.

Music Theory in The Spy Tunes Method

The eBook Music Theory is now only available in the The Spytunes Method.

In this package few stones are left unturned as you get 8 eBooks, 29 videos and 254 Jam Tracks!

-Dan (your guitar guru)

The Stave and the Clef

The clef on the stave is not set in stone!

For those of you who just can’t stop asking yourself: but why?!?, might have looked at the stave in the last couple of music theory lessons and said:

  • Why is C on a ledger line?
  • What does the clef actually mean?
  • Aren’t there other clefs as well?

And you would be right, let’s clear this up as well since the clef determines everything we do on the stave!

The clef we use as guitar players is called a treble clef. When we start drawing this by hand, we start on the second to lowest line of the stave and draw out.

This line is where the note G will be.

In some countries the treble clef is therefore called a “G clef”.

But there are also other clefs, the bass clef for example starts on the second to highest line and that note is an F, but two octaves lower than where the treble clef indicated its G.

This F is on fret 1 on the guitar so there is no point for guitar players to use this clef since almost everything we play would be above that system.

On bass on the other hand, the majority of its range sits perfectly well on the stave using a bass clef or “F clef”, what the bass player reads as an F sits where the D is on guitar!

The Guitars range on the stave

The guitar has a huge range, below you can see how the low E starts several ledger lines below the stave and ends several above.

Not all guitars have the same amount of frets, 24 fret metal guitars for example go all the way up to E, spanning 4 octaves.

Most guitars however have 3 octaves and a bit available.

In the picture below we go from a low E to a high G.

Playing in different octaves

The 8va sign is used to allow us to write on the stave, so it’s easy to read, the 8va sign then tells us to: play this an octave up.

Similarly there is an 8vb tells us: play this an octave down.

The system below further explain this.

How much you end up using the 8va sign and how often you use ledger lines is up to you, most sheet music you’ll end up reading, if you really get into this, will be your own!

Music Theory in The whole Enchilada!

The eBook Music Theory is now only available in the The Spytunes Method.

In this package few stones are left unturned as you get 8 eBooks, 29 videos and 254 Jam Tracks!

-Dan (your guitar guru)

Tones and Semitones

Tones and Semitones describe scales!

Instead of seeing all intervals in relation to the root we can take our seven notes and look at the distance from one to the next.

This is described in intervals of Tones and Semitones, or Whole steps and Half steps if you are American, not English.

Describing the major scale in this way we get:

1 (T) 2 (T) 3 (S) 4 (T) 5 (T) 6 (T) 7 (S)

We can see that between the 3rd and the 4th we have a semitone as well as between the 7 and octave.

On the guitar it looks like this around fret 3 and 15 in C major.

On the piano in C major it would look like this:

Every instrument in the world that use the major scale will have a unique twist on how the scale is displayed, how it changes in order to play the same scale, but in a different octave or key etc.

Consequentially, when you learn an instrument, you have to learn how to finger the pattern of the major scale in order to have a frame work to play sheet music from.

It’s important to understand that it is only the piano that has this incredibly clear view of C major when you look at its keys.

Perhaps it is because of this that music theory is often taught with the starting point of “all white keys on a piano is C major”.

But as you know now, music is created from a series of natural intervals, not letters of the alphabet!

It’s the piano that has adjusted to the way music work, not the other way around!

Name the notes

So far we have established that it is not 12 notes between an octave but a series of intervals that after thousands of years of development got specified and named using letters.

This journey wasn’t without hiccups either, for example, in Sweden they used to call the note B H and the note Bb B, some actually still do!

The formal explanation for this was that the note H sounds harder than Bb, which is basically a way to complicate something that was pretty difficult to grasp in the first place…

Anyway, replacing the 1 2 3… with notes of C major we would get this:

C (T) D (T) E (S) F (T) G (T) A (T) B (S)

On the stave it looks like this:

It is from this benchmark that music is written and read as well as how the remaining notes of the 12 note chromatic scale are discovered.

In this series of music theory lessons I will discuss how to change from C major on the stave using sharps and flats but we shall see how the pattern on the guitar remains the same.

On the piano on the other hand, it would look completely new!

All instruments have unique ways to deal with key signature changes in practice, but can with sheet music communicate with each other.

It is because of this that you need to learn how traditional music theory work on the stave as well as on the fretboard.

Without this it will be very difficult to communicate with musicians playing other instruments than guitar.

In the next lesson, we’ll have a look at how the stave and the clef work!

Music Theory in The whole Enchilada!

The eBook Music Theory is now available in the The Spy Tunes Method.

In this package few stones are left unturned as you get 8 eBooks, 29 videos and 254 Jam Tracks!

-Dan (your guitar guru)

The Major Scale

Sheet music is based on the Major Scale!

In the last music theory lesson we learned about overtones and how these ended up creating a scale we today call Lydian.

Thousands of years later we ended up with the major scale and it is from here that sheet music enters.

Sheet music itself is based on these 7 notes, it would be impossible to read without knowing it.

The 7 notes we today call Ionian, or “the major scale”, ended up having these intervals:

1 = Root
2 = a tone a way from Root
3 = a major third away from Root
4 = a fourth away from Root
5 = a 5th away form Root
6 = a natural 6th away from Root
7 = a maj7th away from Root, or seen from octave, a semi tone below Root.

The major scale in Sheet Music

This means that the five lines of the stave, without any sharps or flats have a semitone between the first gap (E-F), the middle line and the gap above (B-C) as well as the top gap and the top line (E-F again)

All other lines and gaps on the stave have a tone between them.

Can you see how without this fundamental knowledge of E-F, B-C being only a semitone apart, sheet music wouldn’t make any sense?

Without that piece of information, it would be easy to assume that the distance should be the same from a line to a gap throughout!

Why 5 lines?

You may now be asking yourselves; why 5 lines, that’s why there’s the strange difference, couldn’t this all have been done in a better way, with a different amount of lines on the stave?

Perhaps, but the reason there are only 5 lines on the stave is because of how notation started out, the choir leader would use his hand and 5 fingers to point out what note he wanted his choir members to sing!

Music Theory in The Spy Tunes Method!

The eBook Music Theory is now available in The Spy Tunes Method.

In this package few stones are left unturned as you get 8 eBooks, 29 videos and 254 Jam Tracks!

-Dan (your guitar guru)